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Tuesday, March 29, 2016

IR Full Female Profs of Color: Few and Far Between

Last week, I asked a question online that was asked of me
and then I asked at the ISA two weeks ago:

Can you name women of color working in the US or Canada who
do IR and are full professors?

At the ISA, folks
could only name one or two.On twitter
and facebook and my blog since then, the total has increased to eleven:

Neta Crawford of Boston University.

Condoleeza Rice, who was a full prof at Stanford before
becoming provost and then worst National Security Adviser.

Jacqueline Braveboy Wagner, City College of New York.

Reeta Tremblay of U of Victoria.

L.H.M Ling of the New School.

Katherine Moon of Wellesley.

Zehra Arat of U of Connecticut

Christine Chin of American U

Saadia Pekkanen of U of Washington

Nazli Choucri of MIT

Sheila Nair of Northern Arizona U.

Not great.Sure, we
could be missing a few, but this short list demonstrates the point that my
friend was making: there are damn few role models/mentors in US/Canada IR for
women who are not white.

One can quibble with the various modifiers/restrictions in
the question:

what is IR?I tended to exclude a few names of those who
are experts on one country or an area and do not do foreign
policy/international relations type questions.I am sure we could get the list to be significantly longer if we
included women who do one area of the world.Indeed, some of the women above can be considered area studies people
but have done some IR-ish stuff.While
the ISA is broadly inclusive so that it includes area studies people, the point
of this exercise was about whether women who do IR might have mentors, not
whether there are women who do IR or comparative.Also, in the conversation I had with my
friend, her concern was in part about the implicit and sometimes explicit
expectations to be an expert in the area of the world her family comes from
rather than being an expert on general IR stuff.There is a tendency to push people of color
to study stuff like an area of the world or race and ethnicity, whereas white
people can be expected to study anything.

why
US/Canada?Well, the friend is in
US/Canada North America and was pondering the availability of mentors.There was no intent to diminish the
contributions of women of color at schools in other parts of the world.While the internet makes it possible to
confer with people around the world, one is likely to meet up with people in
the same region

why women of
color?That was the way it was put to
me.We could use other ways to talk
about race, such as visible minority (the Canadian way to refer to these kinds
of identities), but I stuck with the term that was most inclusive.And identity is always tricky: are Arab
Americans people of color?Traditionally, not so much.Since
9/11?Maybe.I asked a full prof I know whether she was a
person of color and she said she was not, but understood how some might see her
fit that category.Anyhow, I was not
aiming at perfect coding, but at getting a general idea, and the paucity of
names is suggestive.

A quick look at this reveals a few patterns: no Latinas,
three African-Americans and then Asian-Americans making the majority of the
list.So, yeah, there are few role
models for African-American women and none for Latinas who want to do IR.There are few women of color that
undergraduates, grad students and junior profs can look to and think
"well, they made it so maybe I can, too.""

Most of the women listed are post-positivist, which could
mean either that women who do such work are more likely to make it through the
leaky pipeline, or there might be an affinity for a particular kind of IR by
women of color, or maybe sampling bias as one of my key sources of names knew
these people because their work speaks to each other.

One Canadian, several in the Northeast/New England area, a
few from the West Coast, and nothing in between or down south.So, if you want to meet your mentor, it means
traveling for most folks.

How do we "fix" this?How do we have more women full professors of
color in IR?Obviously, whatever
barriers exist to promoting women and people of color need to be broken down.I used to work at a university where there
was an apparent barrier between associate and full, and that helped to
perpetuate the gender imbalance.Indeed,
in Canada anyway, it seems like the process to become tenured is far easier
than becoming Full even though the former means lifetime employment and the latter
might mean a raise.In the US?I don't know.But there has been stuff written on the leaky
pipeline, so we need to find the leaks and plug them, including discrimination
in citation patterns and in listings on syllabi and differential service obligations
(women end up doing more service, which may not help them get promoted).

A different friend of mine told me at the ISA that none of
the female associates have received outside offers, and all of the male
associate profs in her department have received such offers even though the
women have better research scores.How
does that happen?Such a perfect (and
awful) correlation of gender and opportunities?Getting outside offers is one way for people to get promoted faster, and
it seems at least in that one case (more survey work required) one key tool to
fast promotion has been denied.So,
perhaps one way to deal with this problem is to make sure that senior searches
take seriously the full range of candidates and not just the first names that
come to mind?

Stephen M. Saideman

Intro

Greetings! I am a political scientist, specializing in International Relations, my research and teaching focus on ethnic conflict and civil-military relations. I watch way too much TV, and I like movies as well so I tend to write about both and find IR stuff in pop culture. I rant alot about American politics and sometimes about Canadian politics. I like to take ideas I once learned a long time ago and apply them to whatever strikes my fancy.